Who’s crazier; Mad Mahmoud Or the Bailout Bastards?
Ahmadinejad’s God gobbledygook aside, the Iranian loon has figured out something the newly crowned King Henry (Paulson) and his cronies reject root-and-branch:
“‘The U.S. government has made a series of mistakes in the past few decades,” Ahmadinejad said an interview with the Los Angeles Times. ‘The imposition on the U.S. economy of the years of heavy military engagement and involvement around the world … the war in Iraq, for example. These are heavy costs imposed on the U.S. economy.’”
“‘The world economy can no longer tolerate the budgetary deficit and the financial pressures occurring from markets here in the United States, and by the U.S. government,’ he added.”
Economist Robert Higgs has pegged all defense-related spending—the price of America’s empire—at approximately $1 trillion per year. That, and this, will do it.
Update: “THIS MASSIVE BAILOUT IS NOT THE SOLUTION, IT IS FINANCIAL SOCIALISM, AND IT IS UN-AMERICAN.” Who is Jim Bunning? He’s the only politician (other than Ron Paul) to have called the hideous thing by its name: socialism.
Senator Jim Bunning’s statement at the “Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Hearing on Turmoil in the U.S. Credit Markets”:
“We cannot make bad mortgages go away. We cannot make the losses that our financial institutions are facing go away. Someone must take those losses. We can either let the people who made bad decisions bear the consequences of their actions, or we can spread that pain to others. And that is exactly what the Secretary proposes to do – take Wall Street’s pain and spread it to the taxpayers. The plan has not even passed, and already Americans are paying for it because of the fall in the dollar as a result of all the new debt we will be taking on.
I know there are problems in the financial markets, and I share a lot of the same concerns that our witnesses do. However, the Paulson plan will not fix those problems. The Paulson plan will not help struggling homeowners pay their mortgages. The Paulson plan will not bring a stop to the slide in home prices. But the Paulson plan will spend 700 billion taxpayer dollars to prop up and clean up the balance sheets of Wall Street. This massive bailout is not the solution, it is financial socialism, and it is un-American.” [My emphasis]